Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus and information processing method for displaying a list of contents in which the list of contents for document data or image data is divided and displayed.
Description of the Related Art
In recent years, a contents management system has spread in which the electronic documents or the contents at a Web site on the Internet can be registered and retrieved by keyword.
In such system, when many contents are hit by retrieval, the results are divided in units of ten to several tens items and displayed to reduce the data transfer amount to the display side or the memory capacity required on the display side. An order of display at this time is in most cases given by sorting in sequence from the contents of the highest score according to a score method inherent to the system. Such a display method is considered to be effective in the situation where there is almost no preliminary knowledge about the desired contents.
By the way, when a document is retrieved in a document management system within the Intranet or on one's own personal computer, the situation is considered different from searching the Web site at random without any clue with a search engine of the Internet. For example, the user has referred to a desired document before, or heard orally from the creator of document when the document was created, whereby the user has often preliminary knowledge about the document. However, with the above method, the documents are ordered by the score method without regard to such preliminary knowledge, whereby it is unknown in which number's list the desired document exists. Therefore, when there are many hit items, the list of divided results must be changed exhaustively until the desired document is found, taking a lot of trouble.
Also, there is a system in which the list of retrieval results can be sorted using a predetermined attribute that the contents have. In this system, the contents displayed near the lead or end of all the retrieval results by sorting can be easily found. However, in how manieth list other contents are included is not known after all, unless the user changes the list of divided retrieval results and displays it. Therefore, to find the desired contents, the user had to change the list of divided retrieval results exhaustively, taking a lot of trouble.
On the other hand, a method for displaying the retrieval results like a tree structure by classifying beforehand the contents into the hierarchical groups without dividing the results was proposed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-183210.
With this method, in displaying the retrieval results, the group names are only displayed, and when the user selects a group, the contents hit within the group are displayed. Further, the groups are classified in color according to the number of hit contents, or the maximum reference number or maximum matching degree of hit contents within the group is displayed associated with the group name.
However, with the above method, the user could find at once the contents included in the group having the maximum reference number or matching degree among the retrieval results, but did not know in what group the other contents were included. Therefore, the user needed to expand all the groups exhaustively after all to find the desired contents, taking a lot of trouble.